Klaus Marre 08/18/26 (WhoWhatWhy.org)
A lot has changed since the golden age of journalism.
In the mid-1970s, not long after a couple of reporters broke the story that ended up bringing down a crooked, lying president, an overwhelming majority of Americans trusted the news media.
A lot has changed since then, and most of it was bad for journalism.
The public’s faith in the media has completely reversed in the intervening 50 years — from a high of 72 percent in 1976 to a mere 28 percent now. That is less than the 34 percent who say they have no trust at all.
Perhaps without meaning to, Vice President JD Vance recently summed it up perfectly.
“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
We don’t know whether this was a rare honest assessment of the crookedness of his boss, a testament to the ideological entrenchment of GOP voters, or a comment on the waning influence of journalists. In any of those cases, it is a scary thought.
What is even more frightening, however, is that Vance is totally right.
On the journalism side of things, the issue isn’t that reporters aren’t uncovering major stories anymore. They do, including some that dwarf the revelation that Richard Nixon helped cover up his campaign’s involvement in trying to bug the opposing party’s headquarters.
So, what has changed?
What sounds like a simple question is actually very complicated, and it seems quite obvious the big news organizations don’t have an answer — at least not those that are still interested in providing a public service (of which there aren’t all that many anymore).
That last bit is part of the answer. The role of journalism and journalists has changed. But so have Americans… and so has the world.
The news media hasn’t done a very good job adjusting to these changes, and that’s a big part of the problem.
What Has Changed? Everything.
While journalism has always been a business, reputable media outlets were much more than just that during those heydays.
Correspondents all over the world kept Americans informed about what was going on in faraway places like Vietnam, and local newspapers told them where the next farmer’s market was going to be, how the high school football team was faring, who had been born, and who had died.
In other words, they were an integral part of the fabric of the country, and often the only source of reliable information outside of that provided by the government.
That’s simply no longer the case.
First, let’s look at how news organizations have changed since then.
Over the past few decades, journalism has unquestioningly become less serious. That began in the early ’80s with the emergence of CNN and USA Today, which turned news into a consumable.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
The internet accelerated that trend, and before you knew it, audiences were turning to the trough of BuzzFeed and its listicles.
In addition, while it was now possible to get the news to people more quickly, this also meant that many journalists and their outlets began valuing speed over accuracy and putting news events into context.
Finally, there was the challenge of monetizing this online content. Some media organizations opted for paywalls while others turned to “clickbait” to generate revenue with ads.
And then things got much, much worse with the advent of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter because, all of a sudden, news outlets no longer controlled and hosted their own content.
That wasn’t the only problem. In the past, “the news” was generated by trained journalists and (generally) presented in a fairly objective manner with safeguards against misinformation.
That’s not what happened on social media platforms, where any yokel with an opinion (or, for that matter, a Russian troll farm) could present “the news.” This usually doesn’t involve any original reporting but rather the regurgitation of the work of the aforementioned journalists. Or, of course, just misinformation and disinformation.
And because the tech companies were not worried about providing a service for the public good but rather just wanted to make a lot of money, they tweaked their algorithms to maximize engagement and push content that stirred emotions, very often rage and grievance, in their users.
A byproduct of all of this was that journalists themselves changed.
While the anchors of network news shows had always been celebrities in their own right (just more along the lines of a trusted family member), the past few decades have also seen the emergence of brand-conscious celebrity journalists.
That began with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and continued on, for example, with CNN covering Desert Storm.
Once again, the internet and social media made things worse as journalists sought to amass their own personal following.
Back in that golden age in the 1970s, nobody went into the news business to get rich or famous. There wasn’t even a mechanism to do so. Nowadays, however, there are plenty of journalists who seem to view their day jobs as a springboard to internet fame, cable news stardom, or getting that book contract for which they would reserve their juiciest scoops.
That last part is especially maddening because it shows that excellent, Watergate-level investigative journalism is still being done.
And then there are the news outlets themselves.
Many of the biggest ones are now owned and run by billionaires who want to shape the world to their liking. While Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch is the most egregious example, there are now many more.
Obviously, journalism didn’t change in a vacuum.
The news media was forced to react to massive societal changes, such as the emergence of the internet and social media, how Americans consume news, and the arrival of an authoritarian political force that tried to undermine journalism as a potential source for truth.
In every one of these cases, that response has been disastrous.
That is not always the media’s fault, and we are not saying there are easy answers. In some cases, there aren’t any.
For example, there is nothing the horse & buggy operators at the turn of the last century could have done to stay in business, just like it was always clear that the existence of the internet would disrupt journalism.
But news outlets didn’t sufficiently meet the moment.
They never figured out how to use the internet to their advantage instead of being taken advantage of by Facebook and other social media platforms that pilfered their content.
They never made the case to consumers that producing quality journalism comes at a cost.
And too many of them participated in the race to the bottom for clicks.
To be fair, the American people didn’t help. Their appetite for investigative journalism or wonky political coverage has waned. Instead, they are hungry for the kind of slop that propaganda outlets and influencers are dressing up as news.
In other areas, however, the blame squarely falls on the shoulders of the major news outlets.
They failed to address Donald Trump’s endless lies and to unequivocally call out his anti-democratic views and his corruption. Most importantly, they kept giving him a platform because it was good for ratings.
The media’s insistence on treating Trump with kid gloves has done incalculable damage to the country (and to journalism itself).
There are not two sides to every story, and calling out immoral and criminal behavior as such is objectivity.
This is something that the same reporters Trump refers to as “the enemy of the people” still don’t get. They are hanging on to a nostalgic notion of journalism that existed when people were mostly telling the truth and largely acting in good faith, and when the unmasking of a corrupt president could still end a presidency.
But that’s not the time we are living in, and, in order to survive and to continue being one of the few remaining institutions that can hold another crooked president to account, the news media has to find ways to be relevant and trusted again… before every important outlet gets gobbled up by another billionaire who wants to control the news instead of reporting it.
- Klaus Marre Klaus Marre, a former congressional reporter, is a senior editor for US politics at WhoWhatWhy. He writes regularly here, and you can also follow him on Bluesky and Substack.
